Welcome back to The Box Office Report! In this article, I breakdown what happened this past weekend in the box office and give an overall take on how various films are performing. We are still in the summer of 2017 but the flame is slowly starting to fade, which was made more apparent with this weekend’s releases. What do I mean by that? Join me after the break to find out!

I had hopes that The Dark Tower would turn out to be a solid adaptation of The Dark Tower series, written by Stephen King, but it seems Sony dropped the ball in the absolute worse way possible. I’ve not seen the film although after seeing that it has a run time of just a tick over 90 minutes along with a variety of scathing reviews (Rotten Tomatoes: 18%, CinemaScore: B, Metacritic: 34) I made the decision to not see it. I’ve read that fans of the book series are mad because the film differs a bit from the source material and it combines bits from multiple books in the series, which seems bad but most movie adaptations will do this if there are multiple books to pull from. The $19M opening is very soft for a film that was expected to launch a bit of a franchise. The Dark Tower should at least break even, although I’m aware that this weekend is extremely front-loaded as most of the audience were those that are fans of the books. I expect next weekend to have a drop off of over 50% and Sony better pray that the film has a strong overseas performance because otherwise this film is going to be a bit of a bust. Which is a massive shame because this just means you wasted the talents of Idris Elba and Matthew McConaughey. I can’t place the blame on the director or actors here, folks. This one is solely on Sony.

Dunkirk continues its strong play in the domestic box office with a very sweet 35.6% drop from last weekend. Now I want to confess something to all of you. I had read that the budget listed on Box Office Mojo for Dunkirk wasn’t accurate ($100M) and that the figure was closer to $150M. This is why a few weeks ago I stated that if the film can make near $150M then it should be considered a success. I think at this point it’s fair to state that Dunkirk is a successful film as the film has made an additional $181M overseas. Combining that with its domestic total we have a worldwide gross of $314M. Whether the budget for the film is closer to $100M or $150M really doesn’t matter at this point as the film is a success and is still looking to make more than Interstellar domestically ($188M).

Why is The Emoji Movie still in the top five, let alone the top ten? Despite dropping 51% from its already lackluster opening weekend the film is poised to make a least a bit of money as the film is nearly $1M shy from matching its $50M budget. The film has also made nearly $13M overseas. The Emoji Movie is unfortunately going to be staying in the top ten for at least another week and that really makes me…meh.

Girls Trip will probably go down as the sleeper hit of 2017. Absolutely no one expected the film to perform as well as it has. A chance at making $100M domestically off of a $19M budget? Studios salivate at those numbers. An interesting bit of information pointed out by Box Office Mojo is that Girls Trip is performing very similar to Bridesmaids over a 17 day stretch with both films grossing $85M.

Rest of the Top Ten Quick Hits:

Kidnap is a lower budget thriller film starring Halle Berry and that’s all I know about the film. What I do know that the film will turn a bit of a profit thanks an opening that is half of its production budget ($20M). Spider-Man: Homecoming will be over $300M by next weekend. It seems to have recovered well from a really terrible second week drop (62%!) and I think my initial prediction of $325M now comes back into the picture. Atomic Blonde has made back all of its budget domestically, has made a bit of money overseas ($11.6M), and is looking like it will pass the first John Wick film in domestic gross. What more could you ask for? Detroit released nationwide finally and…oh…eighth place…that’s pretty terrible, mate. Not enough star power and a niche story? I know I keep flip flopping on will War for the Planet of the Apes make $150M or not so I’m going to lay a number down and live or die by it. The film will have a final domestic gross of at or near $147M. Yes, the film also recovered nicely after a terrible second week drop (60%). Despicable Me 3 doesn’t need the domestic total when it makes so much money overseas (More on this film in my worldwide totals section).

2017 Domestic Totals:

Would you look at that! Seems that Wonder Woman is roughly a sneeze away from hitting $400M! It will probably cross over that number sometime on Tuesday or Wednesday. The film will pass Spider-Man’s $403M to become the highest grossing superhero origins film all time domestically. I still think it ends with right under $405M. Dunkirk is currently sitting in fifteenth place ($133M) and is roughly $5M off of fourteenth which is Split ($138M). Baby Driver is in nineteenth with $97M (Counting down the days until it hits $100M!) and Girls Trip, which won’t get close to the top ten, is sitting in twenty-first. Spider-Man: Homecoming is essentially knocking on the door to passing Iron Man 2 ($312M) on the list of MCU domestic grosses. Spidey is currently ninth on the list.

Notable Film Closings:

Snatched

Opened: May 12th, Closed: August 3rd

$45M domestically, $59M worldwide versus $42M budget

Look, I’m not a fan of Amy Schumer in the least. Her comedy has been the same for years and she’s not learned out to evolve. Her gimmick is really stale at this point. This film barely broke even domestically and only made $17M more than its budget overall. Is it time for the world to move on from her? Yes. Please.

Smurfs: The Lost Village

Opened: April 7th, Closed: August 3rd

$45M domestically, $197M worldwide versus $60M budget

Geez has this film been out for a long time. While the film failed to make back its budget domestically it was able to make a decent hauling overseas. I still don’t think we’ll see another Smurfs film for a while. The property was doomed from the start as I really don’t think audiences care about the Smurfs anymore, not that it had a massive care for them in the first place. Either way, it’s another odd blunder made by Sony this year.

This film was incredibly frontloaded as it made over half of its total gross from its opening weekend ($26.4M). Biopics on rappers tend to not do well with the only exception being Straight Outta Compton so I find it unfortunate that it couldn’t gain hardly any traction. I don’t personally listen to much rap but I cannot deny the fact that Tupac meant, and still means, a lot to that community. Maybe one day a film, or some form of media, will be created of him that everyone who knew him will be able to agree on and celebrate.

2017 Worldwide Totals:

Despicable Me 3 has performed incredibly overseas and due to that the Despicable Me film series is now the top grossing animated film franchise ever. Shrek, the franchise that it passed, has made over $3.51B worldwide, which I find incredible because I personally stopped watching Shrek films after the second one. The Despicable Me franchise has grossed $3.55B worldwide. This number will continue to grow as Despicable Me 3 is still making money overseas and we still have another Minions film scheduled for 2020 (I also never try to predict animated films. They are some of the hardest films to predict. This year Despicable Me 3 and The Boss Baby, which made $497.1M worldwide, have performed extremely well while Cars 3, $286.4M, fell flat on its face.). Wonder Woman continues to edge closer to $800M. It’ll continue to skirt the edges until the Japan release pushes it over. A final worldwide total of around $820M feels likely. Could Spider-Man: Homecoming reach $700M worldwide? It would need to make $709M to pass The Amazing Spider-Man 2. The film should pass Doctor Strange ($677.7M) sometime this week for eighth place on the MCU worldwide gross list.

The doldrums of August are now upon us! Next week we have Annabelle 2 releasing to give us a good scare, or bad because horror films don’t have the greatest track record. Beyond that there’s not much going on so we’ll continue to watch The Dark Tower and see if some milestones can be achieved by some films next weekend. Thanks for reading and thanks for the support!

So what films disappointed you this summer? Did you have any high expectations on any films released only to be let down? Did any of the summer releases surprise you? Let us know your thoughts on this summer on our Facebook page, via Twitter, or check us out on Tumblr! So let’s get this discussion started!

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About Bat Seducer Chris

I'm a Bat...and I seduce things...No relations to Batman, Bat-Man, Man Bat, or ManBearPig....and maybe the last one was a lie...
If somehow you like what you read you can follow me on Twitter: @Deylin07

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